The Old Testament describes an ancient rite in which the high priest symbolically transferred “all the iniquities of the sons of Israel and all their crimes” onto the head of a goat, and then the goat was released into the wilderness — thus, the community was annually cleansed of the burden of sins.
The Old Testament describes an ancient rite in which the high priest symbolically transferred “all the iniquities of the sons of Israel and all their crimes” onto the head of a goat, and then the goat was released into the wilderness — thus, the community was annually cleansed of the burden of sins. Today, with the biblical expression “scapegoat”, we call a person or group of people on whom we (a family, a team, and even an entire nation) project our Shadow, identify them with socially disapproved thoughts and feelings. And they are ready to be persecuted for it. The role of the bearer of the collective Shadow often goes to representatives of national minorities, marginal social groups, to everyone who is “not similar”, “does not correspond”. Analytical psychotherapists believe that this complex is formed in those who have been rejected by their family. A child who is unwanted or does not meet the expectations of his parents (“not like this”, “of the wrong sex”) feels guilty already for having been born. Trying to compensate for an unbearable feeling of guilt, such people can voluntarily take responsibility for the shadow features of other people, for the sins or suffering of the whole world, and at the same time feel their chosenness and value for society. In the book by the American Jungian analyst Sylvia Brinton Perera, on the basis of the author’s clinical practice, various manifestations of the scapegoat complex in modern men and women are studied.
Class, 160 p.
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